Visiting like a local for next to nothing.

Staying in apartments while traveling around on vacation has allowed us to live like locals in the places where we are visiting; for often less than a double room in a hotel or bed and breakfast. Apartments offer far greater livability with much more space, separate rooms, fully equipped kitchen, in residential neighborhood locations and their proximity to services such as grocery stores and non-tourist shopping stores. The overall quality of our living is so much better while also being less expensive.

For instance, for our stay in Amsterdam, we booked this apartment directly with the owner for 95 Euros a night, a city that our Rick Steve’s guide book said that anything under 140 Euros a night has rough edges. Our 1 bedroom apartment was recently updated with nice bedroom, fully equipped kitchen, dining area (shown), living room, and free wifi. We absolutely loved it.

We’ve been using the vacation rentals section on Craigslist in each of the cities we are visiting to find owners of apartments for rent. The Craigslist method of finding apartments is wonderful because you typically work directly with the apartment owner, getting a better price and avoiding broker fees. You’re also negotiating with the boss and only he knows how bad or not he needs to rent the unit.

An even greater benefit than finding a great place to stay for a great price, is the ability to cook all of your meals. Man, cooking is such a HUGE money saver, it’s not even funny. Cooking and preparing our own meals lets us really stretch our vacation budget. We eat everything in sight for under $20 a day. If we ate out at restaurants and cafes; which you’re basically forced to do in a hotel with no kitchen; it can easily get to be $50–60 a day.

We’re living on about $70 (50+20) a day each, rather than $120 (70+50). And of course the nightly rent gets much cheaper if you stay for a month or longer.

Tags: living+vacation, Lifestyle, Vacation, budget+travel

Wireless wireless everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

Are you ever on the go and just want a bit of wireless for a few minutes, but just can’t seem to find an access point that someone was so kind as to leave open for you?  Or worse, plenty of unsecured access points that are just outside of arms reach.   

Lil’ Pepe can see 15 access points, of which 6 are unsecured but only offering 1 bar of signal.  Now just for a little more range and I’d be set, or some sort of directional antenna to get a beam on.  In fact, I bet one of these access points is the guy I can see camped in front of his computer for hours across the way.  If I could just light him up and sponge his access for a few.

What I need is an antenna that has a long cable and a suction cup so I can throw it up on the window facing the street.  Maybe with a little parabolic dish to really get some range.  Only if…

Alas, It’s another evening on the road without access.  I guess I’ll find things to do offline… like update my blog with notepad.exe

 

Tags: Wireless, Travel

The Best Travel Accessory

For my money, the Swiss Army Knife is the best travel accessory. I bought mine on sale at Amazon for about $15.00. My Swiss Army Knife is small enough to fit in my pocket or pack, so it goes with me everywhere I go.

For my $15, I get:

A long blade knife, a short blade knife, a bottle opener, a can opener, a wine opener, scissors, a large and small flat blade screwdriver, a hole punch, toothpick and tweezers.

Although I don’t use the knife everyday, I use it frequently. Ranging from making picnic sandwiches, opening a bottle of beer or wine, tweezing a sliver and even punching a smaller hole in my belt.

The size and weight you pay in your travel gear for so much versatility is unmatched.

Traveling with a Laptop

I’m among the always travel with a laptop crowd. I know this flies smack in the face of some travel purists, where a laptop only holds you back from getting out and enjoying the place that you went all that way to go see.

Well, the fact of the matter is that you have downtime no matter where you are. After beating the streets and seeing the sites; sometimes it’s the best thing in the world to come back to your place and pop online for a few hours. I get plenty of travel experiences in on our journeys, and find having a laptop invaluable, and would never leave home without one. Ok, I’ll qualify the above statement, that I’d only consider traveling with a tiny laptop. There is nothing worse than lugging a 15 or 17” brick around with you; where a sub or ultra portable can disappear into your luggage.

The fun and flexibility that a laptop affords is totally worth the extra weight in your pack, and if it’s old enough, hardly worth worrying about.

My current rig is an old Dell Latitude x300. It does most things that I want, at a price tag that I can afford to lose… it’s a loaner. Plus it has a built in SD card reader, which is what my camera uses.

This little laptop serves lets me do the following:

Apartment/Hotel reservations – I use craigslist.org to contact apartment owners directly as I travel. Contacting owners usually saves me money on commission / booking fees, so I get better places for less money in better neighborhoods.

Internet Phone – Skype is so handy while traveling. Not only do I usually pay 2 cents a minute to anywhere in the world, it makes dialing international phones SOOOO much easier than on my cell phone. I also have my cell phone forwared to my Grand Junction account, so I can get my voicemail for free over the Internet.

Photo Management – Taking photos is an essential part of traveling for me, and managing them on a computer lets you enjoy the photos on a larger screen, but plenty of free tools like Google Picassa and Paint.NET let you play with your photos immediately.

iTunes / Music Management – I have my entire music collection on a small huge 250GB Portable Hard Drive. I only have a 4gb iPod nano.

Diary / Blogging – I’m using BlogJet as an offline blogging tool to keep in touch with friends and family. No need for an internet connection to do my damage.

TV / Movie Theater – My afore mentioned portable hard drive also has tons of movies and episodes, (that I bought over iTunes, of course!) VLC Media player is the best that I’ve found.

Email – Email is a no brainer, and Outlook has a great offline mode especially useful for traveling when you are only occasionally connected. Nothing like being off line to actually read some of those ‘I’ll get to it later’ messages.

Fortunately, this laptop is not powerful enough to play World of Warcraft.

Tags: Travel, laptop, internet+phone, tech+travel